BritCits

'My husband's nationality and my salary denied him entry to the UK. Now a court will rule if such cases breach human rights.'

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/04/immigration-monetary-value-breach-human-rights

'Last night I was standing at Heathrow airport in tears. The good kind of tears. The kind that come when your husband finally lands on UK soil, 18 months after you got married, so you can at last begin your life together.

'We met four years ago, one snowy Sarajevo night. My husband is from Montenegro, and we were both visiting the Bosnian city that weekend. Our relationship developed during my many subsequent trips to the former Yugoslavia, and there are so many shared memories: Balkan coffee, pine needles falling into the sea, sunlight and laughter. The place where he asked me to marry him, by the water as the sun set, was the same jetty where we had sat under the full moon and begun our relationship.

'A month after we got engaged, a law was passed that meant that Raco and I suddenly didn't have the right to live together in the UK. Changes to immigration law in 2012 mean that if you marry someone from outside the EU, then you can bring them here to live with you only if you earn more than £18,600 a year. The year we got married, I didn't qualify. If you have children together, the financial requirement increases steeply for each child: if I had become pregnant, the figure would have risen to £22,400 and I would have been looking at life on my own in the UK as single mum. The law also means that it is now almost impossible to bring an elderly relative to the UK...

'... You can't apply market values to human rights.'